Today at 00:45 CET my daughter Victoria was born in Bergheim, Germany. Although the birth was very hard and Victoria is in a special hospital for children now, I'm the luckiest man in the world. After a very long night all seems to turn out fine now and found some time to rest and inform you all. It was the most exiting moment in my life. Thanks for your patience, if Mamboportal.com will not be updated that regular in the next days.

As you might have noticed, Mamboportal.com is not releasing news the last two days. Sadly I encountered an error in the backend administration of the content section in MOS.

Currently I don't have found the bug, but we are working on it. I have contacted my webhoster yesterday and the development team today. While all other parts of the website work fine, the content section doesn't. This news was posted through the frontend.

Please be patient, I'm working hard to solve the problem and serve you with news soon again....

I receive several emails from people having problems to log into Mamboportal.com every week. In most cases the problem is located at the users side. I have reduced 99% of all errors to the following problems:

1. Security settings (mostly IE): Please make sure you are using a security level, that allows the setting of cookies. If cookies are disabled, you can not log in.

2. System time: Mambo sets a cookie based on the current time plus a certain amount of seconds. If your system time is wrong, your cookie will be deleted immediately after creation, which leads us to the first problem.

3. Spam protection: If your email account is protected by anti-spam software, the email with your account data probably will be deleted. Without the emailed password you can not log in. Even the 'lost password' function can not work properly, if anti-spam software deletes it.

So please make sure you check the above points, before you email me with any problems. Thanks.

Today I set up a new poll about your job status. I translated the poll from a german poll from another website and hope I did it allright. Otherwise contact me. As always please everyone vote at this poll. Thanks!

The results of the last poll can be seen when you read on. I wanted to know how regular you visit Mamboportal.com. Most people are daily visitors (50%), while we also have a hight rate of first time visitors (20%).

Today Mamboportal.com reached 500,000 visitors! This makes me very proud, as Mamboportal.com now is my most successfull webpage. And this is the time to say Thank You to so many of you, who made this all possible. Thanks for sending in news or uploading files, Thanks for spreading the word and all your moral support over the last months.

Mamboportal.com will continue to expand it's service over the next month. I will move the webpage to a new server with even more power and some extra bandwith. I also will begin to build up a team, which will moderate and administrate Mamboportal together with me to make it even better.

So thanks again to you all and be sure to check out Mamboportal.com the nexts months to get your daily dose of Mambo...

Mamboportal.com is proud to welcome another local support website for Mambo users. Today PlanetaMambo.com has opened up their doors and will try to give MOS support to portuguese users.

The team from PlanetaMambo.com will also translate common components and modules to the portuguese language. If you want to take a look or maybe even support the portuguese team, head over to their website at:

• www.planetamambo.com

I set up a new poll today about how often you visit Mamboportal.com. As always everyone is invited to vote at the poll. It would be great if many of you could participate.

The result of the old poll, which asked about users sex, is finished now. More than 700 people took part in this poll. The result can be seen, when you read on.

The year 2003 is gone. It was the year when I first discovered Mambo and decided to make a small news portal. Since then more than 450,000 people visited Mamboportal.com.

Many thanks to you all, who helped me to make this possible. I wish you all the best for the year 2004. I hope this year will be so exciting than the last year was.

Personally I want to announce the release of AkoBook 3 (by the end of this year), AkoReview (mid februar) and maybe AkoGallery 2 (mid march).

Finally I found a temporary solution to the Allan Parker traffic threat with my webhoster. We will install a traffic limit for Mamboportal.com. If this limit is reached the website will be cut off from the net. This is bad for the community, but a least saves me to get financially ruined.

As a result of the whole thing I decided to move the website to a bigger server which will make it more safer against attacks from outside. This will happen the next few month.

Mr. Allan Parker apologized for his behavior and offered a donation of 200 USD. I denied this donation, as I did not get financially hurt. Accepting his donation would only give him reputation again. As I and the community is not buyable I did not accepted the donation.

Sadly Mr. Parker could not accept the NO the second time and send me 100 USD, although I don't wanted him to. So he costs me time again, while I refunded the money to him immediately.

Finally I hope I can go back to normal now and don't have to deal with any more things from Mr. Parker. Everybody should be alarmed if he gets in touch with you...

Minutes ago I reopened up the downloads section of Mamboportal.com. Due to the latest development I decided to only let registered users access the filebase. This prevents Mamboportal.com from deeplinks and minimizes the risk of traffic attacks.

Because of this weekends delay I have tons of new files waiting in the pipe. Be sure to check Mamboportal.com later this day for a bunch of new files.

First of all I would like to say 'Thank You' for your help in this case. You are just great! Especially I want to thank Brad Baker from www.rochen.com and Stephan Uebelhoer.

We have tracked down Mr. Parker to his hosting providers and contacted both about his threat against Mamboportal.com. In the meantime he offered me 200 USD through his boss. It seems the servers he is taking about in his emails are the ones at the above hosting company. So we contacted their ISP (Level3) too and informed them about the possibility of an attack against Mamboportal.com.

Although Mr. Parker has apollogized for his behavior, I'm not sure if I can trust him. Rick Cogley pointed me to strange thing happened in january at Linuxfromscratch.org (see http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-chat/2003-January/004305.html). This is why I contacted my webhoster to protect Mamboportal.com and to take legal issues if necessary. We are working on a solution already and I hope I can put the filebase back online tommorow.

I will keep you informed here on Mamboportal.com. I attached the last communication between me and Mr. Parker, if you read on.

Today a guy called Allen Parker contacted me and asked me to sync my whole filebase. As I don't wanted someone to profit from my hard work I said no to his request.

He got very upset about that and I tried to explain my reasons in a second mail. In his answer he still was agressive somehow and showed me he easily could produce 1,500 GB of traffic at my website.

As I'm a private individual I can not pay for such a huge amount of traffic. I'm somewhat frightened and sad but decided to take the filebase down. It is really depressing to see that someone can easily crush the work of months.

To take your own opinion about what happened I added the whole emails to this news. Just click 'Read more' to see the mails.

An exciting Mambo year is nearly over and the christmas eve is near. Time for me to 'Thank You' for visiting my website and for you support during the year. You made Mamboportal what it is today. I wish you and your families all the best.

Arthur Konze

Our spanish sistersite Mambohispano.org has updated to MOS 4.5 recently. Webmaster Funmaking has also designed a cool new template for his portal. For the future he announced the release of a Mambo superpack, which will be completely in spanish language. So be sure to check out his website:

• www.mambohispano.org

The poll about your age has ended. More than thousand people voted and we have a very precise result about the age of the MOS community. Most of the users (75%) are between 20 and 40. Read on, to see the full results.

I set up a new poll about the sex of the MOS community. As always everyone's vote is welcome. So please go ahead and make your vote at the right.

After updating to RC3 Mamboportal.com was down for 1.5 hours. A problem with the frontpage component made the sorting of news by date impossible. Currently I have installed an older version of this component, which surely is no final solution, but at least displays the news the right way. Sorry for the delay...

In the old poll, I asked you if and why you would pay for addons for MOS. They most people (57%) are not willing to pay for additions to Open Source software. The few voters who would pay, would do this only, if the addon has a very high quality. Read on for the full result.

I set up a new poll and ask everyone to participate. This time I want to find out the age structure of the MOS community. So it would be nice if many of you could vote. Thanks.

The next lesson for upcoming template developers has been finished today. This time I started with a style sheets guide for MOS 4.5. This guideline, which will continue on lesson 04 and 05, will be a mostly complete guide through Mambo's CSS classes. This is a must read, so take a look at it here:

• Lesson 03 - CSS Guide Part 1

Today I finished lesson 02 of my templates tutorial. The second article is about the elements of a MOS template and explains very detailed, which elements can be added and how to do this the best way. The article replaces an outdated version I compiled months ago:

• Lesson 02 - Template's core elements